Right-wing attempts to brand ‘trans ideology’ a terror threat used ‘misleading’ data

A statistic used by right-wing groups to justify classifying “trans ideology” as a domestic terrorist threat has been debunked as “misleading by design”.

Earlier this month, The Heritage Foundation, a hard-line conservative think tank behind the right-wing presidential blueprint Project 2025, petitioned the FBI to add what it called transgender ideology-inspired violent extremism to its list of domestic threats in the US.

The organisation blamed “transgender ideology” for the death of right-wing pundit Charlie Kirk, despite the man charged with the shooting not publicly identifying as trans.

The petition, launched in association with the Oversight Project – which describes itself as a right-of-centre lobbying and electoral advocacy organisation incubated at the Heritage Foundation in 2022 – called on the FBI to update its domestic extremist threat list to include “TIVE extremism,” defined as a “belief that wholly or partially rejects fundamental science about human sex being biologically determined before birth, binary and immutable”.

The organisations claimed that “50 per cent of all major (non-gang-related) school shootings since 2015 have involved or likely involved transgender ideology”.

However, the claim was debunked little more than a week later by Wired magazine journalists Dell Cameron and Andrew Couts, who said the figure of 50 per cent was “not just unsupported, it appears misleading by design, arbitrary in scope and unscientific at its core”.

In an article published on Friday (26 September), the pair wrote that when asked to provide its source for the claim, The Heritage Foundation pointed to a post on X/Twitter from one of its own vice-presidents, Roger Severino.

In the post, dated 23 September, Severino cited just eight shootings, including Kirk’s, claiming that four involved “a trans-identifying shooter and/or a likely trans-ideology-related motivation”.

According to the K-12 School Shooting Database, since 1966, there have been at least 1,944 shooting incidents at US schools, from kindergarten up to 12th grade.

Wired reported that at least four dozen of those incidents were mass shootings, and just three of the shooters publicly identified as transgender or were undergoing gender-affirming care, including one in 2019 and the other four years later in Nashville.

Colorado investigators said in 2019 that the Stem School Highlands Ranch shooter, a trans boy, cited bullying and mental health struggles as motivations. Following the 2023 Nashville incident, police said the shooting was not politically or ideologically motivated.

Journalists noted that, while the K12 School Shooting Database was the “most comprehensive of its kind,” it did not include gender data for at least 12.5 per cent of school shooters since 2015.

Rachel Carroll Rivas and R G Cravens, from the Southern Poverty Law Center charity, said that there were no “legitimate studies” that firmly suggested “trans ideology” was to blame for the majority of school shootings.

“Trans people are for more likely to be victimised by gun violence than to perpetrate it,” they said.

Meanwhile, research has shown that those holding white supremacist, far-right or misogynistic beliefs were far more likely to commit mass shootings on school grounds.

PinkNews has contacted The Heritage Foundation for comment.

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